Modernist art historian and reformer of art history. Meier-Graefe
was the son of, Edward Meier, a civil engineer for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Marie Graefe,
(d. 1867) who died giving birth to him. The
family moved to the Rhineland area of Germany; Meier-Graefe grew up near
Düsseldorf, gaining his Abitur in 1879. As an adult, he added his
mother's name to his in her memory. He married Clotilde Vitzthum von Eckstädt, related to
the future art historian Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt. Under pressure from
his father he initially studied
engineering in Munich in 1888,
spending a semester in Zurich (1889) and then at Lüttich.
He traveled to Paris the same year to see the World's Fair, intent on becoming a
fiction writer. By 1890 he was back in Germany, in Berlin, studying art history
under Herman Grimm. He also heard lectures by the cultural
sociologist and art writer Georg Simmel
(1858-1918), the philosopher Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) and the social
economist Adolf Wagner (1835-1917). Leaving Berlin without receiving a degree,
he published two novellas, Ein Abend bei Laura
and Nach Norden, 1890 and 1893, both published by the
illustrious Fischer Verlag. Meier-Graefe frequented the Berlin intelligencia, whose ranks included the writers Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1910),
Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), the poet Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), the
philosopher August Strindberg (1849-1912) and Edvard Munch. Meier-Graefe's
first art criticism was reviewing Munch's work. In 1894, he, Meier-Graefe,
helped found
the cultural periodical Pan, acting as its art editor. The
periodical attracted original graphics by important
artists (including Toulouse-Lautrec) and art-historical writing by Baron Eberhard von Bodenhausen, Harry Count Kessler and Wilhelm von Bode.
However, Meier-Graefe was dismissed after the initial issue by the magazine's wealthy
backers because of the lack of attention to German artists.
He returned to Paris in 1895 where he began his own avant-garde art journal,
Dekorative Kunst, in 1898. The magazine publicized the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) style.
The following year, Meier-Graefe opened La Maison Moderne, a gallery devoted to
art nouveau works, with the artist Henry van de Velde. In 1902 he was commissioned to write on
French Impressionism by the art historian Richard Muther for Muther's pocket-sized surveys
of art, the Klassische Illustratoren series and the Sammlung illustrierter Monographien.
The first volume was Edouard Manet und sein Kreis. His gallery closed in 1903 and he returned to Berlin to write
his ground-breaking history of modern art, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der
modernen Kunst (The Developmental History of Modern Art). Meier-Graefe
opposed valuing art based upon nationalism or the criteria of the academy.
In his 1905 book Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (The
Case of Böcklin and the Teaching of Unity), Meier-Graefe pointed out how
lacking in modernity the popular Swiss artist was compared to the truly
avant-garde of France. The book caused a furor, touching chords of nationalism and a particularly vitriolic attack by Henry Thode (and met with an equally powerful rebuttal by the painter Max Liebermann). He returned to French art and the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille
Corot and Courbet as well as the Impressionists. In 1910, he published his book
Spanische Reise (Spanish Journey) which again broke ground with an
analysis, sometimes described as a "rediscovery" of El Greco. While
others, such as William Stirling Maxwell had written favorably of El
Greco previously, Meier-Graefe described El Greco as an Expressionist artist. Meier-Graefe's commitment to
the primary sources of art history led him to translate Delacroix's journals into German in
1912. However--and ironically--German Expressionism itself repelled him.
In 1915 he volunteered in the German army on the Eastern front where he was
captured and interned in a Russian POW camp in 1916. After his release, he
divorced his first wife in 1917 and married Helene Lienhardt, settling in
Dresden. Together with the art historian Wilhelm Hausenstein, he edited the
art-history yearbook, Ganymede, beginning in 1919. He moved to
Berlin in 1921, occupying a house designed by architect and architectural
historian Hermann Muthesius. In 1922, he
wrote a biography of van Gogh, titled Vincent. Of van Gogh, Meier-Graefe characterized his art as addressing the alienation modernity. Meier-Graefe's embrace of most
modern art drew the ire of national socialism in Germany. He moved to
France in 1930 for health reasons, resulting in permanent exile by the rise of
Nazism in 1933. The Nazi's
included him, one of the few art historians, in their attack on
"Degenerate Art," (Entartete Kunst).

Die Entwicklungsgeschichte is a key writing in the history of modern art
historiography. Meier-Graefe created a history of art for the nineteenth
century, relating artists from Delacroix to Cézanne into a continuum, which had
never been done before. Die Entwicklungsgeschichte traced
nineteenth-century art through the conception of artistic impulses (das
Bildhafte) as opposed to economic or historical forces in art. He was the
first to conceive the modern era of art as a
series of formal problems solved on the canvas. His books were quickly
translated into English and his writings accessible to an English-reading
public. John Rewald characterized Meier-Graefe as influential for French
modernist art historians, an art historian uninterested in scholarship or
"library research," ("The French learned . . . from Meier-Graefe," he wrote). Meier-Graefe could never shake off the reputation
of being anti-German,
however. His attempts to show the work of Böcklin as reactionary resulted
in an understandable backlash (see Adolf Grabowsky book, below). His
failure to embrace twentieth-century art forms (Cubism, German Expressionism)
was particularly tragic and raised the ire of at least Emil Nolde, who branded
him an "enemy to German art." At sixtieth birthday in 1927, shortly before
hostilities against him would again foment, tributes poured out from
personalities as different as the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) and the art
historian Emil Waldmann.